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Design patterns in government – 2016

Our design patterns are part of the tools and resources for government designers

How can we design at scale?

That’s the challenge that I’m working on with Tim Paul at the Government Digital Service.

When Tim first started working at GDS, the designers could fit into a room and sharing was easy. Now we’ve got hundreds of designers working on transforming government services in the UK, with the challenge of creating a consistent, easy experience for every person who uses a government service.

A conference is a chance to reflect

In our usual work, we have lots of opportunities to learn from and work with designers who are creating and improving UK government services. The sketch above shows some of the ways our design community exchanges ideas, such as the email list and cross-government design meetups. Tim and I also do research with designers – as described in our article for UXPA magazine.

This conference complemented those opportunities by giving us a chance to reflect on the year as a whole and look forward to next year.

We learned that we need to share internationally

One (welcome) surprise was that well over half the people who came to our session were from outside the UK. They are also working on delivering better government services for their own citizens, and we recognise that sometimes non-UK people use UK services (and vice versa). For example, Bernard Tyers at the Home Office wrote about launching a service in Kuwait.

Our designs must work for everyone

People don’t have much choice about government services. If you have to claim job seeker’s allowance, get a student loan, or renew your passport then you’ve either got to engage with government yourself or find someone to do it for you. So we talked a bit about the challenges that poses and how we no longer recommend three popular design patterns:

Patterns are only helpful if designers use them

Our designers across government are busy, highly competent people: we need to make sure that our patterns save them effort and help them to deliver better designs faster. It’s no good having patterns if the designers can’t or won’t use them in their work.

We talked about four methods we use to make sure our design patterns are useful:

Research: our users are designers so we do user research with them

Co-creation: design colleagues join us in making and improving the patterns

Enforcement: use of patterns is written into contracts and service agreements